iOS 13 Photos stopped downloading from iCloud

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iOS 13 Photos stopped downloading from iCloud

With iOS 13 I wanted to give Photos another try as my photo library of around 6000 photos so I added all the photos to the Photos app on MacOS (Mojave) and waited for the upload to complete.

After turning on Photos in iCloud with the “keep originals”, I left my iPad connected to power and locked for a full day hoping that would speed up the download to iPad.

After checking in after a day, it still says ‘Downloading 630 originals” so I left it plugged in and locked for most of another day and it STILL says “Downloading 630 originals”. It is not paused, because “pause” has always been right after this status message. I even rebooted the iPad and waited an hour and still no change. I do see all of the thumbnails in “All Photos”, so it has downloaded the optimized versions.

How do I get Photos ‘unstuck’ on downloading originals?

Posted on Oct 3, 2019 11:01 AM

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Answer 1

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Lee_Butler Author

Level 1

70 points

Oct 3, 2019 9:08 PM in response to Lee_Butler

After experimentation with Shortcuts, I have found a way to force downloads to complete when they seem stalled. The following Shortcut (see image) opens every image in Photos and creates a horizontal gallery by combining them. The combined content disappears at the end of the Shortcut because I did not add an action to save it anywhere.

After running this (ran quite a while) my Photos have completed downloading. It appears that the Media Combine action is similar to opening each photo for edit, forcing the original to be downloaded.

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Answer 2

Nov 4, 2019 11:30 PM in response to Lee_Butler

I've had the same problem.

I manuallly forced the download by selecting a month's worth of photos and then selecting "save to files" from the share sheet.

This worked well, but is manual.

Unfortunately I still have 44 images yet to download from iCloud and I have no clear way to identify which they are.

I tried this Shortcut - kinda a genius idea sir; golf clap all around - but unfortunately it didn't work.

Still got a mystery 44 images awaiting download from iCloud fast going nowhere; not sure what to do here.

Thanks

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iOS 13 Photos stopped downloading from iCloud

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